The Call
by Ri2
Summary: Post-series. It is the duty of the Trollhunter to answer the call, no matter how mundane, pointless, banal, or absolutely horrifying. Every call. No matter what. Even if they really, REALLY don't want to deal with it...


Having recently finished watching Trollhunters in its entirety, I was inspired to write this short thing. Hope it entertains!

Disclaimer: I don't own anything that doesn't belong to me.

…

"Mmhmm… Yes… I see… Oh yes, that's interesting…" The blue rock-skinned troll murmured, adjusting a variety of lenses and apparatuses worn over his six eyes with his four arms as he studied an absolutely massive crystal set in the wall of the colossal underground chamber he, a blue-skinned young man with horns, fangs, and a suit of black and gold armor with glowing red lines inset into it, a lovely young woman in form-fitting purple armor, and an old man (also in armor) sitting on a nearby rock with a bored expression on his face found themselves in. "Yes… Yes… Aha!"

"Is that a good 'aha?'" The armored troll (well, half-troll) asked hopefully.

"You've been studying that for hours, Blinky," the young woman said. "What's the verdict?"

"It's perfect, Master Jim!" Blinky said ecstatically as he lifted his extremely complicated goggles off his face and turned to face his friends with a beaming grin. "This Heartstone is absolutely perfect to form a new troll settlement around! Why, I dare say it's even better than the one we had in Trollmarket, not the least of which because there's no ancient evil sealed underneath it!" He hesitated, then glanced at the old man. "Ah, there isn't an ancient evil sealed underneath it, is there?"

"I don't think so, no," the ancient wizard Merlin mused. "I don't remember putting any here. Then again, I've sealed so many ancient evils in underground prisons, they all blend together after a while."

"Why am I not surprised?" Jim muttered under his breath, before feeling a sensation against his hip. "Hmm?" He reached into… Somewhere? And pulled out a cell phone, which was vibrating. "Hey, it's Tobes!" He said eagerly, recognizing the caller ID.

"Oh, tell him and AAARRRGGHH! I said hello!" Blinky said eagerly.

"Me too!" The woman added eagerly.

"Do as you will," Merlin said, completely uninterested.

Jim answered the phone. "Hey, Tobes! Good timing, we just found the new Heartstone and-"

" _Jim! Jim! You have to get back to Arcadia, now! It's an emergency!"_

Jim stiffened, his friends immediately sensing something was wrong. (Merlin wasn't paying attention and probably wouldn't have cared anyway.) "An emergency? Slow down, what's going on?"

" _Oh, Jim, it's horrible! Imagine the worst thing you can possibly imagine, then forget it, because it's even worse than that! It, it's so horrible that… That I can't even describe it! Jim, you gotta get back here now, before it's too late!"_ Toby wailed.

Jim's eyes widened in alarm. An endless array of nightmarish scenarios, each worse than the last, paraded through his mind. Jim had seen and done a lot of horrendous things in his short time as a Trollhunter, and Toby had been with him for most of it. If it was really that bad… "Okay, hold on, we'll be right over!"

He quickly hung up. "Toby's in trouble! We have to get back to Arcadia, now!"

"Right you are, Master Jim!" Blinky agreed. "… Only, how exactly are we supposed to do that? We aren't anywhere near a gyre station."

Jim hesitated. "Uh, good question. Claire?"

The armored girl made a face. "My magic's been getting better, but I'm nowhere near that good yet. Plus, I'm a little wary of opening shadow portals since we don't want a certain evil sorceress getting out."

"If you all had done your jobs right and decisively killed her, that wouldn't be a problem," Merlin complained. They ignored him.

"Right. Which only leaves…" Jim winced, realizing he had only one option left. "Merlin! I need to get back to Arcadia right away. Can you send us?"

"Can't. I'm in the middle of something very important," Merlin, who was now flipping through a newspaper, said disdainfully.

Jim's eye twitched. "… You're reading the comic section."

"Like I said. Very important," the old wizard grunted.

Glaring furiously at the ancient sorcerer, Jim proceeded to rip the newspaper out of Merlin's hands, and slowly, meticulously, tore it to shreds. He then shoved the pieces into his mouth, chewed on them, then spat out the saliva-covered wad of paper at the wizard's feet.

Merlin scowled at Jim. "I can turn you into a frog, you know. I've done it for far less."

Jim wasn't even the slightest bit intimidated. "And Claire can turn me back to normal with a kiss, and we'll be right back where we started. Send us to Arcadia!"

Merlin uttered an aggrieved sigh. "Oh, fine. But you're going to have to get back the hard way!"

He gestured, and Jim and Claire disappeared. Blinky blinked, realizing he was still there. "Er, why am I still here?"

"The new troll settlement won't build itself, and I'm certainly not going to do it. Off you go," Merlin said, conjuring a new newspaper and resuming reading where he left off.

Several of Blinky's eyes twitched. "It beggars description how my people ever came to revere you."

"Your guess is as good as mine. Pretty much everyone tells me that I'm utterly insufferable to be around for some reason," Merlin commented as he flipped through the pages.

…

In a flash of light, a startled Jim and Claire materialized in Toby's bedroom, causing their shorter, more rotund friend to squeal in alarm and fling his phone, which he had been clutching to his chest like a sacred relic, into the air, only for it to be caught by his roommate, the giant troll AAARRRGGHH! AAARRRGGHH! promptly ate it, for he was hungry.

"Jim! Claire! Oh, thank goodness you're here! And wow, a lot faster than I anticipated," Toby cried in relief, throwing his arms around his two best friends.

"It's good to see you too, Tobes. So what's the emergency?" Jim demanded. "Is Gunmar back from the dead? Morgana back from the shadow realm? Is my mom okay? What's going on?!"

Claire looked out the window. "I don't see any fires or hear any alarms. The town looks peaceful."

"Oh, the town's fine, and Dr. L… That, uh, is something we should probably talk about later… But no, the thing… It's… It's downstairs! Oh, I can't bear to even think of it!" Toby wailed, bursting into tears and covering his face.

"How bad is it?" Jim asked AAARRRGGHH! in concern.

The huge troll shuddered. "It bad. _Real_ bad."

Toby's other roommate, Gnome Chompsky, chittered in agreement and continuing boarding up the windows of his dollhouse from the inside, his "wife" holding a toy shotgun and watching over their "child."

Jim and Claire exchanged alarmed looks. "Okay, Tobes, don't worry. We're here now. We've got this under control," Jim said, summoning his Eclipse blade, the sword which had slain the Dark Underlord Gunmar the Black and ended his reign forever. "I'll take care of this."

" _We'll_ take care of this," Claire gently but firmly corrected him.

Cautiously, they crept down the stairs into Toby's house, Jim in the lead with his blade, followed by Claire, with a terrified Toby and an increasingly uncomfortable AAARRRGGHH! in the rear. As they drew closer to the bottom of the steps, they could hear a strange, wet sucking sound which caused Toby to whimper, raised Jim's hackles, and made AAARRRGGHH! moan miserably.

 _What could it be?_ Jim wondered, starting to get a little frightened. (Never a bad thing, the first rule of being a Trollhunter was always to be afraid, after all.) _I've learned about and encountered all sorts of horrible, unspeakable things, but… None of them have ever sounded like that. What_ is _that?!_

And then they reached the main part of the house, entered the living room, and saw _it_.

Toby shrieked. AAARRRGGHH! broke and ran screaming back upstairs, smashing any furniture or walls that got in his way. Claire promptly threw up. And Jim, who had stared death in the eye more times than he could count, survived for over a month in a literal hell, and experienced things so terrible a man twice his age would have been weeping within seconds, dropped his sword, a look of unspeakable horror on his face. "It's worse than I could've possibly imagined…"

A troll looking nearly identical to Blinky, only blind and somewhat more sinister in appearance, glanced up from the very old human woman he had been enthusiastically making out with. "Do you mind? We were in the middle of something here!"

Toby's grandmother giggled. "We were just about to get to third-base!"

Claire threw up again. Toby wept. A tremendous crash could be heard from upstairs as AAARRRGGHH! Jumped out a window, taking most of the wall with it. Jim, who had survived for weeks in the Darklands and withstood all of Gunmar's tortures without his willpower faltering in the slightest, collapsed to his knees, his armor dissipating, utterly broken. "Dear God, Toby. It's even worse than you said."

Toby nodded rapidly. "I know, and I thought it was bad when she was dating the alien!"

"Right… Wait, what?" Claire asked in confusion.

"Long story. Not important now," Toby said dismissively.

Blinky's older brother Dictatious snorted. "Honestly, you children are making too much of a fuss about this. We're both consenting adults and can do as we wish in our own time!"

Nana shook her head in disappointment. "I'm disappointed in you, Toby-kins. You're fine with your half-troll best friend dating a human, but when your _Nana_ does it, now it's an abomination of nature!"

"They're totally different things!" Toby insisted. "They're totally different things, right guys? Back me up here."

"Toby," Claire said weakly, having emptied the contents of her stomach several times over. "While I agree this is indeed one of the worst things we've ever dealt with, what exactly do you want to do here?"

"What, isn't it obvious? Kill Dictatious for seducing my sweet Nana!" Toby cried, pointing a finger at the troll. Claire threw up again.

"I never! If anything, she seduced me, after we bonded over our mutual inability to see anything more than a few millimeters from our faces!" Dictatious said indignantly.

Nana giggled and kissed Dictatious on the cheek. "That I did, schnookums!"

Claire dry-heaved. "Oh God, why?"

"God had nothing to do with this, Claire," Toby said solemnly. "He had nothing to do with it."

Jim made a face. "Wait, hold on, you want me to _kill_ Dictatious?"

"Yes!" Toby said enthusiastically.

"Toby, I can't kill Dictatious just because he's dating your grandmother!" Jim insisted.

"Of course you can! He's an evil troll! It's your job to kill evil trolls!" Toby insisted.

"I'm not evil!" Dictatious insisted. Everyone stared him. "Anymore." They kept staring. "That often…"

"You see?" Toby cried, gesturing at the troll.

"I'm still not going to kill him," Jim said in exasperation.

"The Trollhunter has to answer every call, Jim! Remember?" Toby claimed. "If you had to clean Bagdwella's toilet or clean out her never-ending gnome infestations every other day, I don't see why you can't do this!"

"Dictatious is Blinky's brother! I can't kill him! He'd never forgive me!" Jim argued.

"Blinky hates his brother!" Toby retorted.

"Still?" Dictatious asked, disappointed. "I'd thought he'd be over that by now."

"You tried to _kill_ him," Claire pointed.

"One time!" Dictatious retorted.

"Look, if you want him dead so badly, why can't you do it? Or AAARRRGGHH!?" Jim asked.

"I can't kill him! Nana would never forgive me for killing her boyfriend!" Toby said indignantly. "But you're not related to her, so it's okay. She's never liked you that much anyway."

"He's right, I don't," Nana agreed cheerfully.

"I'm not particularly fond of you, either," Dictatious agreed.

"And AAARRRGGHH! Can't do it because he says Dictatious reminds him too much of Blinky. So it has to be you, Jim!" Toby insisted.

"Look, Tobes, while I agree with you that this is wrong on so many levels – – _so_ many levels – – I'm not going to kill Dictatious just because he's dating your grandmother!" Jim declared.

"You were perfectly fine with trying to kill Strickler because he was dating _your_ mom!" Toby retorted.

"That's… I… That's not… That's different! I wasn't going to kill him _just_ for dating my mom, but for everything else too! And besides, he's not doing that anymore," Jim protested lamely.

An uncomfortable silence filled the room. Nana cleared her throat. "Um. About that…"

…

Jim, a haunted look on his face, stared at his mother and his former nemesis Strickler, who were sitting next to each other on the couch across from him.

Very close to each other.

With their hands touching.

Wearing matching rings.

Strickler coughed, neither he nor Barbara Lake able to meet Jim's eyes. "Well. Young At…Jim. There, ah, there's something your mother and I have been meaning to talk to you about…"

…

A crotchety old man furiously banged on the door of the Domzalski residence. "Dictatious Galadrigal!" he bellowed. "Come out and face Varvatos Vex! Varvatos Vex shall grant you a glorious death and present your still-beating heart to fair Nana as proof of Varvatos Vex's affections and superior qualifications as a mate!"

Suddenly, from a few doors down, a howl could be heard. A howl of purest anguish and despair, the sound of a man who had been driven to the brink of madness as his world was torn down before his eyes, all of his dreams and hopes for the future irrevocably dashed by a cold, uncaring universe as he was confronted by a horror beyond his imagining.

Varvatos Vex recognized this howl instantly, for Varvatos Vex had been the cause of many in his day. "Oho! Varvatos Vex _has_ to get in on this! Congratulations, Dictatious, you get to live for another day!"

Varvatos Vex eagerly started for the Lake household, wanting to join in on the misery.

…

"Well," Claire said awkwardly, struggling to find a bright side in the face of all… This, determinedly not looking at Dictatious and Nana, who had resumed kissing and… Groping each other… "At least nothing much has changed with my family…"

"Actually, your other brother is the mayor now," Toby corrected her.

"Wait, _what?!"_

…

The Changeling NotEnrique, a sash with MAYOR written on it far too big for him draped across his body, sat behind a big desk in a fancy office with a large window behind him affording a view of the entire town, a blank look on his face. "I have no idea how this happened."

…

 **Yes, I'm aware that Dictatious and NotEnrique left for New Jersey with everyone else. Let's just assume, for the sake of comedy, that they went back to Arcadia (Dictatious because he kept getting lost on account of his blindness and NotEnrique because he decided he wasn't quite old enough to move out yet. Despite being about 1000. Even trolls can have a failure to launch, I suppose.)**


End file.
